Harold Schechter Depraved The Shocking True Story America's First Serial Killer

Hardback copyright 1994 A child in New Hampshire, Herman Mudgett was considered a lad w2 a future. By age 11 he was experimenting on small animals, skilled at disabling his subjects w/o killing them. In 1886 in the Chicago suburb of Englewood, Illinois he showed up as Dr. H.H. Holmes to the wife of the ailing owner of Holton's drugstore. HIRED on the spot the store prospered. But when Holmes's attempt to purchase the drugstore from Mrs. Holton went sour she sued him, she disappeared. As Jack the Ripper was terrorizing London, Holmes was building his “Castle," a grandiose residence & veritable fortress bristling w/ battlements & turrets. He hired & fired lots of workmen to build the castle, thus eliminating witnesses to its secrets: a labyrinth of trapdoors, winding passageways, dark dead-end halls, stairways to nowhere, bedchambers fitted w/ peepholes, asphyxiating gas pipes, soundproof vaults & torture chambers, greased chutes large to send bodies to a cellar equipped w/ acid vats, crematorium, a dissecting table, & cases of surgical tools. Pretending a doctor, druggist & inventor, Holmes was also a get-rich-quick schemer:bigamist, w/t 3 wives & innumerable lovers - at least 1 ended up a prize skeletal specimen, sold to a medical college for nearly $200. But his increasing audacity & carelessness during his reign of terror led to his discovery of him & to "The Trial of the Century," in which Holmes finally confessed to twenty-seven murders.